Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

What is poetry? Is it stanzas written on a page? The flow of words in a certain rhythm? And why have humans done it for thousands of years? These questions are at the heart of a—relatively ...

James Matthew Wilson is an award-winning professor of religion and literature at Villanova University and the author of two poetry collections, Some Permanent Things (2014) and The Hanging God (2018).

“In the particular is the universal,” said James Joyce. In Forest of Noise, the particular is the Israel-Hamas war and the suffering of the Gazans, as recorded by the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha ...

The short answer is “no,” of course. To state the obvious, things can share certain attributes and not be the same sort of thing, and asking whether rap is poetry has always struck me as a useless ...

In “What is Poetry? Part 1,” Jeffrey Thomson mentions everything from badgers and hurricanes to subways and Times Square. Somehow that makes the “Part 2” poem from his new book, “Half/Life: New & ...

A freshman dorm mate won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry nearly a decade ago. His book sold, according to the last count that I saw, 353 copies. Sure, there is at least one young contemporary poet, ...

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, who captured the world's attention when she read her poem "The Hill We Climb" at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration, will be published December 7. Gorman’s ...